A Contrastive Stylistic Analysis Between Chinese And English International Economic News

There has been a long history for the study of style. In ancient Greece, Aristotle attempted to explore the art of language use and focused on how to persuade the audience in Rhetorics which was the necessary book for orators and defenders. In China, Liu Xie presented the art of writing and the style of the article in Wen Xin Diao Long in 5th century, which was considered to be one of the most classical works for the study of style in ancient times. During a long period, this subject has been conducted as rhetorics by the scholars both at home and abroad.Traite de Stylistique francaise written by Charles Bally in 1902 is usually considered as marking the beginning of modern stylistics; since then, linguists started to go deep into this field from different approaches and they established some models of analysis. The first conference on stylistics was held at Indiana University, U.S.A. in 1958, which was of historical significance to the development of stylistics, because it was acknowledged as a discipline from that meeting. In China, the pioneer being Wang Zuoliang's Studies of English Style embarked on the study of style in foreign language teaching field. Chinese scholars have spent a great deal of efforts and contributed a lot for the development of the discipline.Based on the scope of study, stylistics is commonly classified into theoretical stylistics, literary stylistics, non-literary stylistics and applied stylistics. Applied stylistics is the stylistic analysis of the language varieties in terms of field, tenor and mode such as advertisement, news reporting, sports language, diplomatic language, business report and so on. Although applied stylistics has not been the research emphasis at present, it has practical function on the field of pedagogy and translation. In the future, it is certain that the study on applied stylistics will be increased a lot.News English, as an important part of modern English, has its distinctive features and organic structure. Economic news is the information for business and trade which is closely related with national industry and our daily life. With the rapid development of global economy, Chinese companies need a great number of experts who have a good command of English and business knowledge. Therefore, reading economic news on the one hand is the basic requirement for the economic majors, on the other hand, has a practical function for English majors.This thesis consists of six parts including introduction and conclusion. Chapter one presents a synthetic description of literature. The author generalizes the works and research by previous scholars as well as different schools at present. Then, a summary is made on the study of news English. According to the research, Chinese scholars have implemented to conduct in this field from 1980s. At present, the stylistic analysis on news English has involved the context, social, historical and cultural elements.In Chapter two, the author presents the interpretation of style and stylistics by different scholars in history as well as the specification of News English.In Chapter three, the methodology of the thesis is given. The author specifies the origin of the data adopted in the thesis and explains that the contrastive analysis is meaningful as both English and Chinese samples focus on the same issue.Chapter four, which focuses on the data analysis, is the core of this thesis. After analysis, the author generalizes the following findings: There is a slight difference on the graphological level in terms of punctuation and paragraphing; On the lexical level, more acronyms of the name of organization are applied in English economic news. Chinese journalists utilized more fuzzy terms than their foreign colleagues. Comparing with other genres, English news uses a lot of premodifications and postmodifications. The utilization of comparison in English economic news is more flexible than Chinese news. On the Grammatical level, the author finds that both apply the complex sentences while English news mainly uses the past tense and active voice; On the semantic level, there is the semantic non-equivalence for some words; translators should be careful in choosing an appropriate meaning of neologisms.In conclusion, the findings of the thesis are summarized for the field of pedagogy and translation, and the research will be supplemented in the future.